In August 2014, Amazon acquired video-game streaming service Twitch for $970m (£585m), making it one of the most talked about acquisitions of the year. Hear CEO and founder Emmett Shear discuss how to build and engage a massive digital audience and hear his thoughts on the future of gaming.
Twitch is a place for the best players in the world, but also the most entertaining and creative players, explained Shear.
We did two things differently. First, we focused on gaming. Equally importantly, we focused on the broadcasters … we designed everything we did through that
On Amazon buying Twitch:
More than half of active gamers are consumers of Amazon already
Sometimes when a big company buys a smaller company, the big company threatens the smaller business, he said. The thing with Amazon is that Twitch is not its core business, so it’s complimentary, not a threat:
They didn’t think that they knew the Twitch business better than the people who built it
In terms of the platform’s users, some are actually replacing watching television with watching Twitch, Shear said. It’s something people can switch on, sit back and relax to:
We see pretty incredibly high viewer retention rates
Watch the full session, and all other 2015 Changing Media Summit sessions, at our live stream archive here.
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